


We'll Be Fine, I'm Sure

by moogle62



Category: Copycat (1995)
Genre: F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 19:17:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/601187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moogle62/pseuds/moogle62
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When MJ comes back home, Helen has a new address. (On recovery, and where to start.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	We'll Be Fine, I'm Sure

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ruuger](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ruuger/gifts).



> Set post-movie and has themes of dealing with a traumatic event (never graphically described).

When MJ comes back home, Helen has a new address. It isn't a new thing -- coming up from a haze of painkillers on her mother's couch, a day after being released from the hospital, MJ took the cordless phone her mother held out to her with a wordless look of surprise and when she pressed it to her ear and sank back against the couch cushions, Helen had said _I've sold the apartment_ before she'd said hello -- but it makes MJ feel strange when she thinks about it, standing just inside the department doors and looking at the spot on the floor where Reuben bled to death not a month ago.

By choice, MJ has taken the shortest amount of leave the department would allow. People keep glancing at her when they think she isn't looking, which she hates, but she still can't get down that corridor without seeing Reuben's blood spilling out over the lino, hearing Helen laugh feral and weightless on a moonlit roof.

//

The last time MJ saw Helen, they were both on hospital gurneys. MJ had been almost out of it for the whole ambulance ride, vision coming and going, a potent combination of a sudden loss of adrenaline and a bullet-ridden bulletproof vest, but the memory of seeing Helen wheeled past her in the E.R. corridors is as clean as the through and through shot in her shoulder.

Later, they told MJ she had two cracked ribs to go with the bullet wound, but at the time she just felt hurt, sore in a way she'd been warned about by guys on the force with their own scars to explain. Helen, sprawled over a gurney like a cut-string marionette, dark hair and red suit stark and strange against the bleached white sheets, had been surprisingly easy for MJ to focus on.

She was arguing with the doctor pushing her down the hall when MJ caught her eye. 

"Christ," Helen said, taking her in, hard consonants in her sore voice, and MJ managed a smile.

MJ has a memory of Helen's knuckles brushing the back of her hand while they were both close enough to reach for the other but there's no way of knowing if it holds true.

//

She's in and out of consciousness for a couple of days, thanks to the morphine drip at her side, and when she's finally got a clear enough head to think properly, she's told she'll need supervision for a few days when she gets home, help around the house. MJ, eminently practical when she can be, can't even begin to think about what to do next, about going home to heal in her empty apartment. It's like MJ stopped when she folded into Helen's arms in the half closed rooftop door, like time should have stopped alongside her so she can work up to facing the last few days. Reuben's gone; the case is closed; Helen walked across a roof under the vast night sky, held MJ close while they listened to the police sirens scream closer. It's a lot, by anyone's definition.

The publicity of the case got MJ a private room, and the space helps some. Mostly though, MJ just wants to get back to work. It's easier not to think when there's something else to be doing.

"What about the woman I came in with?" MJ asks when she can, while a nurse is taking her blood pressure. "Helen? What happened to her?"

Karen, the nurse, works morning shifts, has two small daughters and smiles more genuinely than MJ would know how to fake. She doesn't know whom MJ means but offers to ask around.

MJ doesn't like to wait. She describes Helen physically as best she can and then doesn't skimp on the less positive adjectives to talk about the rest -- difficult, stubborn, demanding -- figuring that Helen's not an easy woman to miss.

She's right.

Karen remembers Helen now, had forgotten her name in the way familiar to anyone who works a job with long hours and a steady stream of people to reassure; the less essential names, the unrepeated ones, never stick. Helen discharged herself, the nurse explains. She came by while MJ was asleep, said she didn't want to leave a message. Wasn't MJ told?

Clearly, MJ wasn't. 

"She stood in your doorway for a while," Karen offers, setting MJ's chart back on the end of the bed. "She obviously had something to say."

MJ pictures it for the rest of the afternoon; Helen bruised and determined to get the hell out, taking long still seconds to watch MJ sleep.

//

The Lieutenant stops by the day MJ gets discharged. She's on leave, he tells her, with no preamble, and not to come back for at least a fortnight and it'll be desk work for a fortnight after that. She argues, and it's at least in part because she's wearing one of her mother's cardigans over the fragility of her thin hospital gown, and she'll be damned if she lets the Lieutenant notice. MJ looks him in the eye, sees his awkward compassion, and wishes she were wearing one of her work jackets.

When she finally leaves, Nico has sent three bunches of flowers but hasn't visited once. MJ doesn't blame him.

//

Her mom packs her into the back of her car with a blanket, despite the summer heat outside, and drives her home. Her mom's house is a two-storey place with a green door and a steep roof, an hour's drive from the hospital. MJ's dad walked out for good when MJ was six, and her mom's house is full of memories of her and her mom: the uneven carpet up the stairs that meant MJ kept snagging her pantyhose; the sky-blue blanket draped over one end of the couch that her mom always tucked over her when she was sick. 

MJ crashes out in her old room even though it's barely past three, and her mom wakes her up by pressing her hand against MJ's forehead, taking her temperature like she's as young as she has to act with certain witnesses, just as the sun is finally going down. MJ shifts herself along the bed so there's room for her mom to settle down along her good side and sit there while MJ dutifully takes her pain meds, awkwardly handles a spoon with her good arm to get down a bowl of chicken soup.

Her mom hasn't said one word about MJ's job or about being scared near out of her mind though MJ knows she's itching to, just leans down and kisses MJ's temple like she did every night while MJ was growing up.

"Sweet dreams," her mom says, and MJ figures she can stand two days here, a week tops, before wanting to crawl out of her skin with it, keep going all the way back to her apartment.

MJ spends the whole next day camped out on the couch watching the worst cop show reruns she can find and taking as many painkillers as the doctor said she could until Helen rings and tells her she's sold her apartment.

MJ's shoulder hurts like she didn't think was possible and her ribs ache when she breathes and she can't lift her arm far enough to reach for anything let alone wash her own hair, but the sound of Helen's voice on the phone is sharper than she's ever heard it in person, closer to the grainy trial videotapes MJ poured over for hours, and it makes her think, if Helen can move into a new apartment, there's no way in hell MJ's going to languish here on her mother's couch for any longer than absolutely necessary.

She misses work already, even almost misses the terrible precinct coffee. The news is still running stories on the night she shot Peter Foley. The Mouth reports it with wide eyes and, despite everything, increasingly unflattering descriptions of MJ. MJ thinks it's probably fair given the number of names she has for the Mouth. She watches every time it comes around on a news cycle, intense, like she's cramming for a test. Whatever Helen is doing now, setting up her new apartment or not yet done with her old one, MJ wonders if she's taking time for the news.

What MJ wouldn't give for Helen's police scanner right now.

//

MJ finally gets back to her own apartment when her mom is satisfied that she can shower without someone standing outside the bathroom door, listening for a fall. There's a pile of mail on her doormat, probably mostly bills, and she kicks it out of the way to get through the hall. 

She puts her holdall in the bedroom closet and opens all the curtains. It's early afternoon, and the hills of San Francisco are soaking up the sun. She thinks, out of nowhere, about the sweeping bay views from Helen's huge windows, and about who might be looking out across them right now.

She's still got Helen's old number somewhere, scrawled on a corner scrap of yellow legal pad paper in Reuben's chicken scratch handwriting. She only holds it with the very tips of her fingers when she finds it. It's not going to do her any good now.

//

By the end of her first day back at work, MJ is already sick of signing her name to the endless stack of paperwork on the right of her desk.

She keeps rolling her bad shoulder back. It still hurts. Not as much, but it's definitely still noticeable. MJ resents her physiotherapist for the simple reason that he knows when she's lying about it. 

At least she can drive again, short distances, and it's enough that she doesn't have to rely on anyone to get her back and forth from home. She hadn't been too proud to ask when she needed a ride, but only because the alternative had been worse, walking endlessly around the same few rooms, staring at the same view from her window until she was deemed safe behind the wheel. She doesn't know how Helen did it. She thinks that probably explains the huge windows, wonders whether Helen's new place has similar amounts of light.

MJ finds herself thinking about Helen more than she can reasonably account for. She's a practical person and not prone to undue sentiment, which is why it needles at her that she keeps waking up from dreams about the roof, about staggering up the dark staircase with the wall taking most of her weight and her hand shaking hard around her gun, hearing Helen laughing like the end of the world far ahead. 

She checks her watch. Her shift's almost up. 

//

Helen's new apartment is in a taller building than the last, right on the top floor. MJ doesn't know whether it makes her feel more or less secure -- harder for someone to get in, sure, but equally difficult to get out of in a hurry.

Helen opens the door to MJ like she's been expecting her, even though MJ hadn't called ahead, and for the whole time MJ is there they don't say one word about the holes in their lives where pieces of their hearts used to be, or how they're both doing, or the shellshocked parts of themselves they left on the college rooftop.

Helen tells her she's writing another book. Her office is, if anything, more of a mess than MJ ever saw Helen's old apartment, even when it was covered in computer cables and crime scene photographs. MJ thinks maybe that's a good sign. 

In return, MJ tells her about the cases she's not solving, stuck to her desk until the LT gives her the okay, and Helen raises an eyebrow and hypothesizes for her. MJ trained hard for her job, lives and breathes her job like everyone in the department does at heart, but she's never known anything as well as Helen knows her work.

It probably says something about the pair of them that this is the most relaxed MJ has felt in weeks, leaning against the back of Helen's couch with an over-sized wine glass in one hand, listening to Helen's sharp, steady voice recite names, dates, signature crime scene atrocities, but, right now, MJ could not give one iota less of a fuck.

//

MJ drives past a sushi place on her way home one day. She sits and stares at it, stuck in traffic right outside its door. Reuben was always threatening to slip seaweed into her burgers when she wasn't looking.

When the traffic starts moving again, MJ doesn't go home. Instead, she goes to Helen's.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from The Long Haul by NO. Happy Yuletide, Ruuger!


End file.
